News Archive

The discovery of what vision scientists, including lead author and L&S psychologist David Whitney, call the continuity field explains why the brain sometimes sacrifices accuracy for consistency. It also accounts for why the eye often misses tiny visual bloopers while watching movies, according to the study published in Nature Neuroscience.

In an interview with L&S Executive Dean Mark Richards, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education takes a close look at the California Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate. Funded by a $2.2 million National Science Foundation grant, the consortium, led by UC Berkeley and L&S, is working to improve diversity in STEM disciplines at universities and national labs.

Hailed by scientists as a "jaw-dropping" breakthrough in the fight against genetic disease, Crispr (or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) has inspired multiple start-ups, heavily-attended international meetings and now the Innovative Genomics Initiative. Professor Jennifer Doudna will serve as executive director of IGI, launched this week by UC Berkeley and UCSF with support from a $10 million gift from the Li Ka Shing Foundation.

In a favorable review, the New York Times called it "a modest, compact movie about the largest imaginable subject: the structure of the cosmos." Physics Ph.D. Mark Levinson's film, including appearances by his former L&S physics professors, follows physicsists during a milestone experiment to find the elementary particle called Higgs boson.

A scientist and two social scientists will receive UC Berkeley's 2014 Distinguished Teacher Award. The trio of L&S faculty members will be honored at a public ceremony April 23 in the Zellerbach Playhouse.

Professor Clair Brown started offering the one-credit course for sophomores in response to frustrations Econ 1 students expressed at the idea that "more is better" and economic growth paves the way to happiness.